John Mundell

John Mundell is an interdisciplinary cultural studies scholar of race, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Luso-Atlantic world. He is interested in national myths of harmonious race mixture such as mestizaje, racial democracy, and creolization and how these ideologies depend on but also obfuscate Black queer abjection. He is currently writing a manuscript titled Longing for a Racial Democracy: Race, Sex, and Popular Culture in Brazil that uses queer reading, hemispheric Black feminist thought, and African diaspora theory to re-center sex and desire in the cultural productions of Brazil’s myth of racial democracy. Mundell’s work has been published in Luso-Brazilian Review and Latin American & Caribbean Ethnic Studies where he also worked as a translator for a special issue on critical whiteness in Latin America and the Caribbean. He co-directs the multi-institutional working group Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean that serves as a writing and co-mentorship hub for junior scholars working at the intersection of Black studies and Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx studies.